As the daylight was fading, the usual orange-yellow glow of the streetlights gleamed, and Dome-mounted spotlights splashed a whiter illumination over the capital’s great buildings. There was plenty of traffic, rivers of lights flowing around the Dome’s support pillars. In the city in the last few days there had been a sense of nervous excitement. She knew that some people were planning to party all night long, as if this were some greater New Year’s Eve. In anticipation the police had kept Trafalgar Square, the very center of the Dome and the traditional focus of London’s festivities and demonstrations alike, cordoned off for days.
All this activity was covered over by the Tin Lid. Immense strip lights, some as long as a hundred meters, were suspended from that vast ceiling. Their pearly glow caught the slim columns of the supporting pillars, which rose up out of the city like searchlight beams. Sparks swirled around the upper reaches of the pillars and settled in the huge rafters: London’s pigeons had discovered new ways to live under this astounding roof.
And there was that crackling sound again.
You couldn’t be sure what was going on anymore. News had been carefully censored since Valentine’s Day, when martial law had at last been imposed. Rather than factual reports, you were much more likely to find yourself watching some feel-good squib on the heroically huge fans, with names like “Brunel” and “Barnes Wallis,” that would clean London’s air during the period the Dome was shut, or on the Tower’s ravens, whose presence traditionally kept London safe, being carefully protected as the daylight was shut out.
But Bisesa could guess the truth. In the last few days the shield had begun visibly to close over the sun. It was the first tangible, physical sign since June 9, 2037, that something really was going to happen—and it was a strange light in the sky, a darkening of the sun, a portent straight out of Revelation. There had been a huge rise in tension; the cultists, conspiracy theorists, and bad guys of all stripes had been stirred up as never before.
And as well as the crazies there were the refugees, seeking somewhere safe to hide. On this last day London was packed to the rafters already—and Bisesa’s flat wasn’t far from the Fulham Gate. She heard another series of pops. Bisesa was a soldier; that sounded like gunfire to her. And now she thought she could smell smoke.
She tapped Myra on the shoulder. “Come on. Time we went back down.”
But Myra wouldn’t move. “I’ll just finish this.” Normally Myra lay as loose as a cat. But now she was tense, her shoulders hunched, and she was tapping with sharp pecking motions at her softscreen.
She wants to make it go away, Bisesa thought. And she thinks if she keeps doing normal things, keeps on with her homework, she can somehow postpone it all, keep her little nest of normality. Bisesa felt a stab of protectiveness—and regret that she couldn’t spare her daughter from what was to come. But that smell of smoke grew stronger.
Bisesa bent down and briskly folded up Myra’s softscreen. “We go down,” she said bluntly. “Now.”
As she closed the roof door behind them, she glanced back one last time. Those final windows in the Dome were being shut over, blocking out the light, the last light of the last day. And somewhere, somebody was screaming.
35: Sunset (II)
On the bridge of the Aurora 2, Bud Tooke sat loosely strapped to his seat.
The walls around him were tiled with softscreens. Most of them showed data or images returned from various sectors of the shield, and from more remote monitors standing off in space. But there were faces too: Rose Delea sweating in her spacesuit somewhere out on the shield, Mikhail Martynov and Eugene Mangles on the Moon, both monitoring the sun’s final hours before the storm, and even Helena Umfraville, a highly capable British astronaut he had once trained with, her time-lagged image transmitted from distant Mars.
There was no particular purpose in this conferencing. But somehow it was comforting at this time for Earth’s scattered children to keep in touch. And so the links were left open, and to hell with the bandwidth.
Athena coughed softly, an attention-alerting tic she had picked up from Aristotle. “Excuse me, Bud.”
“What is it, Athena?”
“I’m sorry to disturb you. It’s just that the shadowing is almost complete. I thought you might want to see the Earth …”
On his biggest display softscreen she brought up an image of the home planet. But Earth’s face was dimmed. Bud looked into a tunnel of shadow millions of kilometers long, a shadow cast over both Earth and Moon—and cast by a human construction. Bud had seen simulations of this event a hundred times. But even so he was awed.
The silence was broken by Athena. “Bud?”
“Yes, Athena?”
“What are you thinking?”
He had learned to be cautious in his responses to her. “I’m overwhelmed,” he said. “I’m stunned by the scale of what we’ve done.” She didn’t reply, and he said at random, “I’m very proud.”
“We did well, didn’t we, Bud?”
He thought he detected a note of longing in her voice. He tried to figure out what she wanted him to say. “We did. And we couldn’t have done it without you, Athena.”
“Are you proud of me, Bud?”
“You know I am.”
“But I like to hear you say it.”
“I’m proud of you, Athena.”
She fell silent, and he held his breath.
The great task of turning the shield had taken months, and Bud was very glad it was over.
The shield had been purposefully built edge-on to the sun, so that during the years of construction only a fraction of Earth’s light would be occluded: after all, crops still had to be grown. But now the day of trial was approaching, and the shield had to be pivoted so that its face, seen from Earth, lay square across the sun. That trivial-sounding maneuver had been a challenge to compare with any they had faced during the construction process.
The shield was thirteen thousand kilometers across, but it was a thing of glass splinters and spun-out foam, scarcely a solid object at all: you could put your fist through it without even noticing. The lightness had been necessary; otherwise the beast could never have been constructed at all. But that extraordinary lightness of structure made the shield almost impossible to maneuver.
It wasn’t as if you could just burn the attitude thrusters on Aurora2 and haul the whole thing around. If you tried that, the big old ship would just rip itself out of the gossamer web in which it was embedded. And so delicate was the structure that applying excessive pressure anywhere across the face of the disk could easily result in rips, not tilting. What made it still more difficult was that the shield was rotating. The gentle centrifugal force kept the spiderweb structure from falling in on itself. But now the spin was a pain in the butt, because if you tried to tilt the shield it would fight against you like a gyroscope.
The only way to turn the shield was to apply a turning force gently, and carefully, and to distribute it across the disk’s surface so no one area came under too much pressure. The whole thing was dynamic, with the disk’s moments of inertia subtly changing at each moment; computationally it was an immense problem.
The only way to solve it, of course, was to give the job to Athena, the artificially-sentient soul of the shield. To her the shield was her body, its sensors and comms links her nervous system, its tiny motors her muscles. And she was so smart that the complicated task of tipping the disk was nothing but a vigorous mental workout.
So the months-long task had been carried out. By day and night constellations of tiny thrusters sparkled and fired in waves across the face of the disk, their patterns entrancing. Their tiny impulses gently but persistently nudged the disk.